"If men were angels," Madison wrote in Federalist #51, "no government would be necessary."
Thus too with schools and other education institutions. If children were angels, nobody would need to check on whether they did their homework or test them to see whether they learned the week's spelling words. If educators were angels, they would spontaneously leave no child behind and we wouldn't need elaborate mechanisms to hold them and their schools "accountable" for performance.
"Accountability" means the arrangements by which others can determine whether we're doing what angels would do unbidden—and the means by which those others can influence us to become more angel-like. Its two vital ingredients are not angelic wings, however, but, transparency and intervention (or its equivalent: incentives, sanctions, and rewards whose influence is similar to intervention).
Transparency and intervention (and its avoidance) occur throughout our lives. Cars have speedometers and police have radar—and the ability to write tickets—to keep us accountable to speed limits. The physician has a scale. A device beeps if you take an item from the store that you didn't pay for. The monthly bank statement asks to be reconciled with one's checkbook. Dinner guests smile or frown after taking a bite of the meal you've cooked. The remote lets you "punish" a bad television show by opting for another. (If every program were produced by angels, who would need options?) The auditor checks the company treasurer's books and reports his findings to shareholders and the public. And on and on.
In education, we've grown accustomed to accountability at the individual and institutional levels. Has Mathilda passed the 4th grade proficiency test or must she attend summer school? Is the Lincoln School making "adequate yearly progress" or must the district intervene? Do enough children want to attend the Einstein Charter School to enable it to meet its budget? Is Montana making headway on its NAEP math results or should voters replace the governor?
But what of organizations that seek to influence education? To whom is Fair Test accountable? The American Educational Research Association? The Harvard Educational Review? The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation? The American Association of School Administrators? The teachers' unions? Are they transparent? Does anyone have authority to intervene to make them more angelic? Such questions rarely get asked, yet some of these outfits, particularly the unions, are immensely powerful.
This grew vivid indeed in recent days as Barbara A. Bullock, former head of the Washington Teachers Union, was charged with (as the Washington Post put it) "plundering more than $2.5 million from union coffers so she and two fellow union leaders could finance lavish lifestyles complete with fur coats, catered meals, and luxury cars." Bullock has since pleaded guilty and agreed to serve up to 10 years in prison and pay a $500,000 fine for her shopping spree.
Besides law enforcers, to whom is a union's leader accountable? To the members, one assumes, who pay its dues and elect its officers. But what happens when someone messes up badly—and seeks to conceal the evidence? How transparent are teacher unions? Who has the authority to intervene? How effective are the internal controls? Does membership accountability work?
The eight-page "charging papers" in the Bullock case describe what the Post termed "a long unchecked conspiracy" in which she and two henchmen sought "to enrich themselves and others by stealing millions of dollars from [the union] and its individual members."
A similar case is under investigation in Miami, Florida where the longtime head of that teachers' union siphoned large sums out of its coffers and into his own.
How does a membership organization hold its officers and staff to account in the event they turn out not to be angels? Supposedly in the way that voters and taxpayers hold government accountable: democratic politics, the capacity to elect leaders to run the place, to observe their performance, and then to retain or replace them as needed. (Consider what just happened in California.) Government by consent of the governed is supposed to work in membership organizations, too. (This is different from publicly traded corporations, which are accountable to their shareholders, and nonprofits such as think tanks, which are accountable to their trustees and, sometimes, their funders.)
Nearly half a century ago, famed sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow, and James Coleman wrote Union Democracy, based on a case study of the International Typographical Union. They concluded that lively internal politics—the existence of factions, rivals for office, and the equivalent of political parties—had kept democracy vibrant in the I.T.U. But they didn't find it in most unions and attributed its absence to the potent forces of bureaucracy and incumbency:
[A]n incumbent administrator [has] great power and advantage over the rank and file. . . . This advantage takes such forms as control over financial resources and internal communications. . . . The normal position of the trade-union member in modern urban society makes it likely that few individuals will ordinarily be actively interested in the affairs of the union. . . . The absence of membership participation facilitates the existence of one-party oligarchy. . . . [U]nion leaders possess great power to do things which would never be approved if a democratic choice were available.
In other words, non-angelic union leaders can get away with misdeeds due to the absence of viable choices for their members. And that's exactly what happened in the nation's capital. Barbara Bullock "ruled by fear," says the Post, "and proved so effective at stifling dissent that during her last two years in office, membership meetings rarely drew the 100 people needed for a quorum. . . . When [a longtime union activist] would ask a question about union finances, most of Bullock's supporters would leave the meeting. Then someone would call for a quorum and, seeing none, Bullock would declare the meeting over. Bullock ran the union as a political patronage system. . . ."
One might say she ran it precisely the way the unions say schools would be run if it weren't for teacher unions!
The absence of choice is bad for democracy. It causes institutions to go wrong. It saps their accountability. It invites petty (and not so petty) despotism and disregard for performance. How is the plight of members of the Washington Teachers Union different from that of children in failing schools to which they have no alternative? Surely the uncle-knows-best-so-pipe-down-and-trust-us mindset that leads unions to block education choice for families must also habituate their members to expect no alternatives among union leaders, either.
When internal controls fail, outside oversight is called for. That's the theory of NCLB. That's what happened to Ms. Bullock and her confreres when the FBI swept in. And that's what is proposed for large unions by Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who has proposed major changes in form LM-2, which unions file annually with the Labor Department to say how they've spent their money. Today, it's a nebulous document with big categories and little detail. Ms. Chao would have unions explain each outlay of $5000 or more. That's like disaggregating the NCLB test scores so that everyone can see how the kids in a school are doing. But guess who's opposed? The Washington Teachers' Union's parent AFT and its grandparent, the AFL-CIO. The latter's chief, John Sweeney, insists that the revised LM-2 is "craftily designed to weaken unions." But how, then, and to whom, would unions be accountable? Or aren't they?
Union chief led by quashing dissent, by Justin Blum, Washington Post, October 7, 2003,
Former leader of D.C. union charged in theft, by Carol D. Leonnig and Allan Lengel, Washington Post, October 4, 2003
Teachers union ex-chief pleads guilty, by Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post, October 8, 2003
Union doozy, editorial, Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2003 (subscription required)
